The Importance of Being EarnestThe Novel The Importance of Being Earnest was more enjoyable to me than the film. The reason for this was, while my imagination pictured the story and the visuals of the people and the settings quite similar to the on-screen portrayal, my mind’s images were more enjoyable. The differences portrayed on film were distinctive in the characters, scenery, and mostly the soundtrack I had not envisioned while reading the play. While they absolutely worked well the changes were somehow disappointing. This is mostly because of my expectations, and that at first glance, the film seemed very different from the narrative in the play. My feelings are ambivalent about the two mediums we enjoyed. Oscar Wilde’s hilariously witty play was wonderful in text but I felt the film was thoroughly enjoyable as well. It is understandable that when a work is taken from play medium to movie from only 54 pages in length, a good filmmaker will take dramatic license. They will create a screenplay that would fill both space and time and produce an enjoyable movie of sufficient length. In the screen version of The Importance of Being Earnest the contrast between the text and film are immediately apparent from the opening scene. Before there was a chance to identify what my thoughts about the opening scene were, as well as comprehend what was going on; the music accompanying the scene propelled the movie to such a fast clip that I busied myself simply keeping up with the story.

The very next scene depicted in the film was the scene that originally occurred in Algernon’s morning room. In the play through Wilde’s brilliant writing and descriptions filled with subtle nuance, give the reader significant information about Algernon, his home, and his lifestyle. In words we learned that Algernon was wealthy and enough so, to have a large ornate home and hilarious servant, whose dry humor seemingly goes totally unnoticed by his...

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English 213
18 April 2013
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